Pro-government supporters and security forces on Sunday confronted protesters loyal to former Bolivian president Evo Morales in a street melee, the second such violent escalation in a week as fears grew of further unrest in the Andean nation.
The protesters and counterprotesters hurled firecrackers, homemade explosives and stones at each other across a dusty sprawl in the city of El Alto, while riot police unleashed tear gas into the crowds. At least eight people were injured, the Bolivian Ministry of Health said.
The standoff — which erupted while thousands of Bolivians supporting Morales continued a week-long 190km march to the capital, La Paz — spoke to the depth of the schism in Bolivian politics ahead of next year’s presidential election.
Photo: AP
Morales and his former economy minister-turned-bitter-rival, Bolivian President Luis Arce, are vying to lead Bolivia’s long-dominant socialist party, MAS, into next year’s vote. Their power struggle has paralyzed the government, exacerbated the depletion of Bolivia’s foreign exchange reserves and fueled street protests.
The rolling political crisis began in 2019, when Morales — who came to power in 2006 — was forced to resign after being re-elected to a third term in a vote marred by accusations of fraud and mass protests. He left the nation, but made a dramatic political comeback a year later, returning to find he had retained widespread support among poor and indigenous Bolivians.
Mobilized by Morales, bound together by misery over Bolivia’s economic meltdown and outraged by Arce’s efforts to block the candidacy of their polarizing former leader, the marchers on Sunday stopped on their sixth day of walking to sleep at an encampment 11km from El Alto, a sprawling city on a plateau above Bolivia’s capital.
Seeking to portray the march as a reflection of Bolivia’s indigenous highland culture as much as a political exercise, Morales — surrounded by supporters waving the multicolored flag dear to indigenous Andeans that the leftist leader turned into a patriotic symbol when he served as the nation’s first indigenous president — praised his supporters’ “peace and enthusiasm.”
Other Morales supporters broke off from the march and pressed into the scrappy outskirts of El Alto, where security forces and supporters of Arce had massed in anticipation of their arrival. The protesters and counterprotesters clashed in the neighborhood of Ventilla as acrid smoke from burning tires and thick clouds of tear gas coursed through the streets.
Each side blamed the other for the violence.
Morales accused Arce’s government of deploying “paramilitary groups to incite violence,” busing officers into El Alto to stir up trouble — a claim echoed by Bolivia’s ombudsman.
“It’s very sad that this government doesn’t pay attention to its conscience,” said Benita Cruz, a Morales supporter at the scene of the clashes. “They are repressing the poor and most humble people.”
In increasingly dramatic terms, Arce — who earlier this year faced what he described as a military coup attempt — has accused Morales of seeking to sabotage his government.
The unrest offered a possible preview for the coming days, as Morales and his thousands of supporters have promised to continue their so-called “March to Save Bolivia” into La Paz, despite vows by Arce’s supporters to prevent them.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS